Twitter: “Today we introduce a new version of Twitter. We’ve simplified the design to make it easier than ever to follow what you care about, connect with others and discover something new. You’ll see this new design both on Twitter.com and mobile phones, so that you’ll have a familiar experience any time, anywhere. We’ve also updated TweetDeck to be consistent with this new version. … We’ll be rolling out the redesigned Twitter over the next few weeks. You can see it immediately on the just-updated versions of mobile.twitter.com, Twitter for iPhone, and Twitter for Android. You can get early access on your computer by downloading and logging into Twitter for iPhone or Twitter for Android. We’re working on updates for other apps, such as Twitter for iPad, and will share news as they become available. – What we’re announcing today is just the beginning. We now have a framework in place that we will quickly build and iterate upon to help users connect with whatever is meaningful to them.”

Twitter: “Yours to discover – A faster, simpler way to stay close to everything you care about. … Simplicity meets serendipity – Discover lets you tap into a stream of useful and entertaining information, customized just for you. – When you use Discover, you’ll see results reflecting your interests – based on your current location, what you follow and what’s happening in the world. As you use Twitter more, Discover gets even better at serving up more content just for you. – Whatever you’re curious about, Discover will help you find out more. … The new profile section puts you and your interests front and center. – Others can Tweet directly to you and view your lists, favorites, followers, photos and more. The Me tab is also where you can stay current on your direct message conversations. – The Me tab is your opportunity to introduce yourself to the world.”

Twitter: “As part of this release, we are introducing enhanced profile pages that help marketers create an even more compelling destination on Twitter for their brands. – Communicating with users isn’t just about what you say. It’s also about how you say it. Now, your profile page does more to help you make an impression with a large header image for displaying your logo, tagline, and any other visuals. – You can also control the message visitors see when they first come to your profile page by promoting a Tweet to the top of your page’s timeline. … We are thrilled to launch the new enhanced profile page exclusively with 21 advertising partners and select charities and individuals. … We will slowly roll out enhanced profile pages to a wider audience of brands in the coming months.”

Twitter: “We’re also excited to introduce new tools that bring Tweets to your website, and new ways to share with our Tweet buttons. … WordPress bloggers can embed Tweets directly into their posts by simply copying the Tweet URL or using a familiar shortcode. Once published, WordPress instantly turns that URL or shortcode into an embedded Tweet. WordPress.com and WordPress VIP blogs have this functionality immediately, and Jetpack users will get it with their next update. For more news about WordPress and Twitter, check out founder, Matt Mullenweg’s blog post. … Finally, last week we announced a visual refresh to the Tweet and Follow Buttons, and today we’re introducing new ways to share with these buttons. … The new #hashtag button tells your visitors there’s an interesting conversation happening on Twitter, and lets them join in with just one click. The @mention button encourages visitors to Tweet to your account, driving public conversation directly from your website. Get started and configure your own button experiences on our new Twitter Buttons website.”

WordPress: “Would you like some more Twitter in your WordPress? We got ya. As an update to our ever-popular Tweet embedding functionality we’re supporting Twitter’s new embed API to enable richer, better looking, and more functional Tweets inside your blog posts. To embed a Tweet just put a permalink to it on its own line or use our new shortcode that allows for extra formatting. … Finally, if you link your Twitter account on your Gravatar profile we’ve made it so it’s easy to follow you right from that page.”

GigaOM: “Twitter on Thursday debuted a dramatically different new user interface for all versions of the micro-blogging service: The company will be rolling out totally new versions of the desktop website, mobile website, native mobile apps, and Tweetdeck to its more than 100 million users over the next few weeks. … Though during the launch event at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, CEO Dick Costolo and founder Jack Dorsey repeatedly said that the redesign was aimed at making the Twitter experience ‘simpler,’ the new version of the site is in many ways richer and more complex than ever. – That’s not meant to sound like a negative thing: The new UI makes it much easier to find and access context and content around each Tweet, as well as find new Twitter accounts to follow that are relevant to you. … Brands can have a elevated place in the new Twitter design, which makes sense given the company’s necessary push for revenue: At six years old, Twitter now has 700 employees and has taken on more than $1 billion in venture capital. The redesign gives brands, celebrities and businesses ‘enhanced’ profile pages. … In all, it’s a very smart move for Twitter.”

RWW: “Jared says that the new Twitter is ‘vastly different,’ and notes that it brings the activity stream right into the app itself, and now separates @ message communication into ‘interactions’ and ‘mentions.’ Now ‘mentions’ does not include new followers, people who favorite your tweets. It is only about people who directly @ mention you. Everything else gets dumped into the ‘interactions’ feature. For those who don’t want to sift through the two to pick out actual conversation-worthy @ mentions and passerby-type mentions, this could be helpful. On the flip side, it might just make for unnecessary back-and-forth between the two spaces, which ultimately could slow down the user experience instead of speeding it up. Twitter has also de-emphasized the direct messages feature by pushing it into the ‘Me’ tab. … Twitter wants to position hashtags as more than just symbols for trending topics. It has changed the language to try and make it feel more like a discovery tool. The menu bar now says #Discover. Of course it does – what social space doesn’t want to be the source for discovering new, awe-inspiring, shocking or just plain cool information?”

TNW: “In their introduction, Dorsey and Costolo announced that since its integration with Apple’s iOS 5, Twitter sign-ups have been up 25%. … [T]he biggest changes of all have been a redesign and brand new apps that focus on simplicity, discovery and usability. With distribution and monetization [somewhat] under its belt, Twitter is now focused on creating a more meaningful experience for its users. … Twitter’s web and mobile experiences are now one in the same. The new tab menu is the same across all devices so you’ll get the same experience on mobile and desktop. And that experience is much more streamlined and visually focused. … Twitter’s new #Discover Feature is a gamechanger. Or as Twitter says, ‘It’s where simplicity meets serendipity.’ The new Discover section is the company’s first big step into content and news curation. When you use Discover, you’ll see search results reflecting your interests-based on your current location, what you follow and what’s happening in the world. As you use Twitter more, Discover gets even better at serving up more content just for you. … There’s something delicious about Twitter. It’s bite-sized, sharp and smart. It’s a playground for the intellect. Today, Twitter’s redesign has expanded this playground into a well-designed festival. What was simple is now more complex, yet still streamlined and consistent. What was playful now feels exploratory. And something about the new Twitter feels more human.”

GigaOM: “Profile pages weren’t ignored in the large-scale redesign Twitter unveiled Thursday. In fact, the company is now trumpeting itself as a better option than Facebook or Google+ when it comes to showing the world who you are through an online profile. … Why should people direct their focus to maintaining their Twitter profiles when a number of other services – Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn to name just a few – are vying to be the top place for people to establish their identities online? According to Dorsey, it’s all about simplicity. ‘For me, it’s really just access. You just have to share a username or hashtag’ for other people to know exactly how to find you on the site, with minimal searching and sorting necessary, he said during the Q&A portion of the press event.”

TNW: “800 million users isn’t cool. Know what is? 7 billion – When talking about its new direction today, Jack Dorsey spoke about powerful messages being sent in 140 characters or less. He mentioned Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ as an example. What Dorsey is really saying, is that to get everyone in the world using a service, let alone get their attention, you have to keep things short and sweet, and I think he’s right. – This new direction shows a clear path for Twitter to become the defacto service for real-time communication. … Twitter is simple, and wants to remain simple. … Call me nuts, but if Twitter stays simple, it has a shot of becoming the preferred way to communicate. Forget SMS, forget Email, forget Facebook. – Just keep it simple, stupid.“

StumbleUpon: “We’ve made some changes so it’s now easier than ever to Stumble and explore new and interesting things from every corner of the Web. Stumble more with a simpler and easier to use StumbleUpon.com and StumbleBar. Explore more with Channels from your favorite sites, people and brands. Find more using our Explore Box: type a word or phrase and see amazing Stumbles. – Follow Channels and uncover content from sites, people and brands that you already like while you’re Stumbling. – Find More with the Explore Box: Type a word or phrase and see amazing Stumbles related to whatever you’re interested in. – We’ve moved some stuff around so it’s easier to find your way around the things you’ve Liked and to discover even more.”

GigaOM: “StumbleUpon has undergone a major makeover. … It’s the largest and most comprehensive branding and redesign initiative StumbleUpon has made in the company’s history… The redesign is aimed at bringing StumbleUpon’s more granular features – such as the newly-implemented ability to Stumble according to specific interests – to the surface… Essentially, it’s designed to make StumbleUpon more ‘sticky’ than ever. … In all it’s a good move for StumbleUpon, and it’s one that seems long overdue. Once you compare the new look of the site to the old version, you realize how much was hidden under the surface.”

RWW: “StumbleUpon is the inverse of a Google Web search. Instead of typing in a keyword and searching for relevant links within that search, StumbleUpon asks the user to define the parameters by selecting a topic, and then voting the content up or down. Using the Explore Box, users can type in an interest that’s more specific than one of the many comprehensive topic options. It gives a list of related interests, which broadens the breadth of topics to stumble. Over time the user develops an interest profile specific to them. … StumbleUpon is a prime example of the read/write web. Why? Because the user literally writes their own ‘taste graph’ by signaling to the service what interests they want to follow. In the e-commerce space, eBay acquired recommendation engine Hunch to do just that – serve up more relevant content to users.”

Forbes: “One big reason for the changes and simplifying of the website is to make it easier for StumbleUpon to expand internationally, which is one of the company’s major priorities in 2012. StumbleUpon has more than 20 million registered users and is adding more than 1 million per month, but the majority of its users are currently in the U.S. The company wants to address that. … StumbleUpon was acquired by eBay in 2007 and bought back two years later by founders and venture investors.“

Forbes: “[T]here’s no question – Facebook remains the most ambitious, most technologically sophisticated, fastest-moving Internet company. The changes announced [at F8] were as big as anything the company has ever done – to turn Facebook into a real-time engine for seeing what your friends are doing and joining them right now… The changes are all big, but perhaps the most interesting is that Facebook is becoming a real-time communication service. … Longtime tech pundit and thinker Esther Dyson posted on Twitter today that Facebook was launching the ‘semantic Web’ without calling it that. Good, because hardly anyone ever understood what that meant. … In order to launch these real-time features for its platform, Facebook needed a way for users to access them. That’s why it launched the ticker earlier this week. … The best way to think of Facebook is as infrastructure – the social infrastructure of the Internet. Zuckerberg believes Facebook has far more to gain over the long term by reinforcing itself as a universal platform than by any other means. … Granted, it is potentially problematic for one company to own an essential piece of Net infrastructure.”

SG: “Without a doubt, [the] major keynote at f8 2011 showed Facebook to be making some major changes in the very near future. Starting with a whole new layout and set of functions they’re calling ‘Timeline‘ and moving through app enhancements that have the potential to change the way we use apps on all platforms, we’ve got a guide here for you, the Facebook user, to easily understand what you’ve got in store. This is Facebook as it will exist starting at the tail end of 2011. … There is a new class of application on Facebook now called Open Graph. This class is defined by three principles: Frictionless experiences, Realtime serendipity, and Finding patterns. The goal here is to have subject matter (games, music, video, social apps) spread to friends via friends in as enjoyable a manner as possible.”

AF: “According to Zuck[erberg]… ‘A record 500 million people used Facebook the same day. We’re connected now. The next era will be defined by the social apps that use these connections. … But there’s more to us, to our deepest conversations. You want to express the story of your life in terms of the most important and meaningful parts of your life – this is the heart of your Facebook experience.’ … Facebook has created a new class of apps to deal with the next version of open graph. Facebook’s mission is to make world more open and connected. They want you to have a more personal experience. … Now you’ll be able to eat a meal, hike a trail, and so on, and the activity shows up in the news feed. This means Facebook is adding verbs to the connections in the social graph. … GraphRank may be the new EdgeRank. What do I want to see in the news feed versus someone’s timeline? Different types of relationships work differently – work friends versus family, for example. And this is probably going to integrate the new friends lists and family categorizations.”

Guardian: “While Facebook is keen for its users to stay on the site for as long as possible, Zuckerberg has consistently emphasised that the site is a ‘distribution platform’ to other media companies. – The social network has moved to strengthen its ties with media partners in recent months as it moves closer to its hotly anticipated initial public offering. Facebook was recently valued at $66.5bn on secondary markets. Its global revenues are expected to reach $4.3bn in 2011, up from $2bn in 2010, according to the research firm eMarketer. … [Zuckerberg] wants Facebook to be the centre of your web experience. That’s the purpose of the redesign of the ‘timeline’ – the river of experiences recounted by your friends. Rather than being a river, he’s offering the chance to organise it, with the photos and videos. … The key is that he wants Facebook to become the de facto authentication mechanism of the web.”

Green, TC: “I was one of the first people to join Facebook in February of 2004, and launched one of the inaugural applications on the platform in May 2007. The new Facebook profile and Open Graph announced…, along with the launch of smart friend lists last week, is going to usher in a new era of the Facebook platform. And I believe entire industries will potentially be revolutionized by social, from travel to reviews to health to e-commerce, and of course charity. … I am confident we will see major sectors, from music to reviews to commerce, revolutionized by authentic friend-to-friend interactions. We are fortunate at Causes to have a big start in one of the largest markets around, the $300 billion giving market. It is anyone’s guess if the other major categories will go social with their current leading companies, or if entirely new ones will emerge, like Zynga in gaming. Either way, it will be a fun ride.”

RWW: “Facebook significantly scaled up the amount of information it tracks about you – and many millions of other people. The once humble status update field has been expanded to include 6 types of ‘life events.’ You now automatically share data about what you’re reading or listening to. … Here’s a quick summary of what’s changed: A new Subscribe button, allowing you to follow people you aren’t friends with, plus filter the amount of information you get from current friends. Improved friends lists – easier way to group people into lists, including via semi-automated ‘smart lists.’ A News Ticker that streams a constant flow of user updates in a sidebar (on top of your chat bar). A newspaper-like relevancy filter for your Facebook homepage. Instant sharing of what you read, listen to and watch. A new Timeline profile (a colorful history of you and your ‘life events’).”

Google News Help: “Editors’ Picks is a feature that showcases original, innovative news content that a news publisher has on their site at any given time. This content may include long-form narrative articles, slideshows, interactive graphics, or video stories, just to name a few possibilities. – The links you see in Editors’ Picks are hand-picked by the news organization whose logo is displayed above the links. Google News does not select the articles. – If you are a News publisher and wish to submit an Editors’ Picks feed to Google News, please review our guidelines and documentation first.”

Google: “Google News is introducing a new section in the right-hand column of the U.S. edition. The section is called ‘Editors’ Picks,’ and it displays original content that publishers have selected as highlights from their publications. This is the latest addition to recent improvements we’ve made to the variety and presence of stories and multimedia on Google News. – An array of news organizations, including local, national and niche publishers, are now using Editors’ Picks to display their best, most engaging content. Because Google News relies on algorithms, Editors’ Picks will always be just that- picks provided by publishers themselves, and not by Google. … You may have first noticed Editors’ Picks as an experiment last year. Based on the data from that experiment, we have been working with nearly two dozen publishers in recent months and have seen a positive response from readers and publishers alike: readers get the news they’re interested in from the sources they trust, and publishers receive higher traffic to their websites.”

Nieman: “When Google News launched in 2002, it did so with some declarations: ‘This page was generated entirely by computer algorithms without human editors.’ And: ‘No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page.’ – That core approach – computerized curation, algorithmic authority, NoMo sapiens – has served Google News well in the nearly-a-decade it’s been around… Editors’ Picks, a display of original content that journalists (human ones!) have selected as editorial highlights from their publications. … That’s a big deal, and only partially because of Google News’ traditional algo-centricism. … In addition to providing users with more good content, Editors’ Picks might also pave the way for more effective partnerships with news publishers. … For publishers, Editors’ Picks is also a way to highlight brand identity within a platform that has tended to emphasize news stories over news institutions. … It takes the notion of serendipity, in other words, and applies it to news organizations themselves.”

SEL: “More than a year after the experiment began, Google News has brought Editor’s Picks to the home page of its US site – marking the first real human-curated content on what Google has proudly said was always a completely algorithmic way of presenting news. – It could also be seen as something of an olive branch toward publishers, especially given the shaky relationship that’s existed between the two.”

SEW: “This appears to be a win-win for everyone involved. News publishers now have a mechanism to let Google know what their featured stories are. – Readers will be able to see additional content in the form of these features. As a result, Google will likely see a boost in on-site time and stickiness. Clearly the number of articles you read will help you collect Google News badges. – However, bringing search back into the conversation for a moment: since these articles are hand-picked by the editors – which may include editorials and paid features – will this adversely affect relevancy?“

Google: “Just think: when you walk into the pub or step onto your front porch, you’re in fact signaling to everyone around, ‘Hey, I’ve got some time, so feel free to stop by.’ Further, it’s this unspoken understanding that puts people at ease, and encourages conversation. But today’s online communication tools (like instant messaging and video-calling) don’t understand this subtlety: They’re annoying, for starters. You can ping everyone that’s ‘available,’ but you’re bound to interrupt someone’s plans. They’re also really awkward. When someone doesn’t respond, you don’t know if they’re just not there, or just not interested. With Google+ we wanted to make on-screen gatherings fun, fluid and serendipitous, so we created Hangouts. By combining the casual meetup with live multi-person video, Hangouts lets you stop by when you’re free, and spend time with your Circles. Face-to-face-to-face.”

Google+: “Bumping into friends while you’re out and about is one of the best parts of going out and about. With Hangouts, the unplanned meet-up comes to the web for the first time. Let your mates know that you’re hanging out and see who drops by for a face-to-face-to-face chat. Until we perfect teleportation, it’s the next best thing.”

GigaOM: “I don’t think Facebook has anything to worry about. However, there is a whole slew of other companies that should be on notice. Just as Apple put several app developers on notice with the announcement of its new iOS 5 and Mac OS X Lion, Google+ should give folks at companies such as Blekko, Skype and a gaggle of group messaging companies a pause. I personally think Skype Video can easily be brought to its knees by Google Plus’ Hangout. And even if Google+ fails, Google could easily make Hangout part of the Google office offering.”